There are 13 total missions, all of which are broken up into small segments. I understand the need to break the missions up but I feel that they really took me out of the experience. If the load times won’t bother you, the game’s incessant need to stop the action in order to display a pointless cutscene will. At times the game becomes preachy, especially in the early goings when you have a news crew with you. Upon clearing a village of VCs the CO orders the men to burn down the village. At that moment the reporter asks the CO how he feels about burning the homes of innocent women and children. At that time I wanted to turn off the game; stopping the action and wasting my time on such subtext really took me out of the experience. Because let’s face it, first person shooters are about shooting, not exposition and insight. Keep those elements to the loading screens and you’ll be fine. Stop the game to showcase it and you’ll derail the entire experience.
The shame of it all is that there’s a pretty good game hidden underneath, you just have to take some time to find it. Those expecting to be the next Rambo will need to cool their jets for a bit; Vietnam is a very slow and deliberate war. Fought in the thick jungles of ‘Nam, soldiers often treaded carefully for the next ambush could arrive at any time. For the most part MoV does a great job of portraying the combat seen in this war. It’s probably a pretext of the type of war that was fought, but firefights are poorly structured and the majority of a fight is spent firing blindly into any bush that moves. This could have lead to some pretty intense situations had it not been for the game’s weak level structure. In each level there’s always one distinct path that needs to be followed. It never feels realistic as it’s generally about 10-to-15 feet wide, conveniently wide enough to serve as a corridor of death, but not wide enough for any other real-world purposes. Because of this you’ll never be truly ambushed and most of the fire will come from the front. Simply chuck a grenade and move forth, repeat and you’ve got the gist of the action.
You’ll unleash hell with a wide assortment of real-life weapons pertinent to the time period. It’s kind of weird that you’ll often be saddled with a grenade launcher, but since the thing is damn fun to use, I can forgive the designers for it. In addition to being able to crouch you can now go prone, a feature that’s useful when the lead starts flying. There’s a new feature called ‘bandaging’ which pertains to any damage inflicted. When hit you’ll have a limited amount of time to hold down the “B” button. The longer it takes for you to hit the B button the more damage you will accumulate. This is a take on the blood loss that you would expect to take upon getting wounded. I liked this feature but felt it could have been implemented a little better. When bandaging you’ll still be able to fire upon foes and move around the environment. It’s difficult but you can easily hit the B button with your right thumb, use your right index finger to fire and bring your left thumb over to the right thumbstick in order to aim. It takes a little bit of practice but it’s not terribly hard to pull off. For the next endeavor the game needs to place a harsher penalty upon players. Realistically, you wouldn’t bandage in the middle of a firefight, you’d wait until it was over. The game should have taken the weapon out of your hand and forced you to remain mobile while you were bandaging.
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